Benjamin Wachs: Are we getting our money's worth with New York charter schools?

Benjamin Wachs

Thursday

Jan 29, 2009 at 12:01 AMJan 29, 2009 at 7:53 PM

We need to know not only how much we’re spending on charter schools, but whether we’re getting the desired results.

If I were a charter school, I wouldn’t want the state comptroller poking around my books either.
I would prefer to be audited — as they do — only by the organization holding my charter, with which I would have a pre-existing (and probably cozy) relationship: not some state official whom I can’t even invite out to lunch.

If I were a charter school, I might even sue the state to prevent that nosy comptroller from getting to audit me — as charter schools have done — and I would appeal the case to the state’s highest court, as they announced they would last week.

But speaking as a citizen, I’d much rather have an independent auditor monitoring charter schools to make sure their money is well spent.

Hopefully we’ll get that. But, speaking as a citizen, it’s not the audit I really want.

Because the issue with charter schools, and every school in New York, isn’t how much money we’re paying for them: We know we’re paying an awful lot. In fact, according to the Public Policy Institute of New York State, we spend the most per student of any state in America — almost three times as much as other states.

While it’s important for the comptroller to make sure that public money isn’t being funneled to inappropriate places — like the stock market — we already know how much money any given school is getting. That’s easy to find.

What we don’t know is what we’re getting for our money.

To this day, the New York State Board of Regents has never called for an independent comparison of the different kinds of schools in New York to see which methods really work better for their different populations.

Do New York charter schools actually perform better than public schools with similar student bodies? Couldn’t tell ya — the research hasn’t been done. How do some kinds of charter schools compare to others? Don’t know. How do either public or charter schools compare to the few schools in New York state — the “consortium” schools, like the School Without Walls here in Rochester — that follow entirely different learning models than the Regents exams?

Once again, the research has never been done.

The state says it has a measurement, of course: the Regents exams. By making every student take them, we know how well they’re doing in every kind of school district. But you can compare Regents exam scores all day — I think, in fact, they have a guy whose job is to do that — and still not learn anything helpful.

Why? Because:

1) The state scores its own tests, and its scoring methods are so bad they look suspiciously like Tim Geithner’s tax returns. They refuse to allow any independent review. In government, “the honor code” is no replacement for “sunshine.”

2) By using only test scores as a measurement, you can’t adequately compare schools where lesson plans are based on standardized testing with schools like the School Without Walls that emphasize reports, projects, and real-world application.

3) The test scores don’t tell us anything we really want to know anyway. What we want to know is: Will these kids go to college? Will they succeed in the real world? Have they learned what they need to in order to be healthy, productive members of society? Have they learned to educate themselves on their own time? Regents exam scores tell you none of that.

Before we start worrying about how much money we’re spending, it would help if we had information about what to spend it on — and how much it costs to do it right. Without a large-scale independent analysis, we’ll never have that kind of information.

It’s especially important because the small studies that have been done yield provocative and compelling conclusions. Consortium schools in New York City, made up of the same demographics as other public schools, have higher attendance, fewer drop-outs, higher graduation rates, and higher college attendance than schools that rely on a Regents exam-based curriculum. In Rochester, the School Without Walls likewise keeps more of its kids in school and sends more of them to college.

You’d think the state would want to know how that works.

Unlike charter schools, Dan Drmacich, the principal of the School Without Walls, tells me he welcomes independent investigation into his school.

Charter schools should certainly be subject to a full public review of their finances by the state’s chief financial officer — anything less is an abuse of the public trust.

But the independent reviews shouldn’t end there. It’s not enough to know what we’re spending, we need to know what we’re spending it on.